Those dirty green hippies at GE have some news: Solar Cheaper Than Fossil Power in Five Years.
Solar power may be cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels and nuclear reactors within three to five years because of innovations, said Mark M. Little, the global research director for General Electric Co.
Yes, this is the same GE that makes reactors. They know where the future is and it’s not nuclear or coal.
“If we can get solar at 15 cents a kilowatt-hour or lower, which I’m hopeful that we will do, you’re going to have a lot of people that are going to want to have solar at home,” Little said yesterday in an interview in Bloomberg’s Washington office. The 2009 average U.S. retail rate per kilowatt-hour for electricity ranges from 6.1 cents in Wyoming to 18.1 cents in Connecticut, according to Energy Information Administration data released in April.
GE, based in Fairfield, Connecticut, announced in April that it had boosted the efficiency of thin-film solar panels to a record 12.8 percent. Improving efficiency, or the amount of sunlight converted to electricity, would help reduce the costs without relying on subsidies.
The thin-film panels will be manufactured at a plant that GE intends to open in 2013. The company said in April that the factory will have about 400 employees and make enough panels each year to power about 80,000 homes.
If Fukishima didn’t kill nuclear power thin film solar will. GE knows there is no longer any money to be made in nuclear power plants so they are going where the money is there to be made – solar. Free enterprise at work. Nuclear power was never cheap and without massive government subsidies – direct and indirect – not a single nuclear power plant would have ever been built in the US.
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